Thursday, April 30, 2015

Born in New York to Hungarian Jews,
Fanny Brice dropped out of school at the age of 17 and began working
in a burlesque revue. Within two years she was a headliner for
Ziegfeld Follies. By the early twenties Fanny had an enormous hit
with the song “My Man” for Victor Records. It was around this
time that she married her second husband Julius “Nicky” Arnstein
who had served prison time in Sing Sing and had gang connections.
Arnstein's lifestyle would return to haunt the couple as he would
later be convicted of Wall Street bond theft and would again serve
time in prison. Brice, at great expense, funded his legal defense.
After serving three years, Arnstein was released and and left Brice
and their two children. Fanny would eventually marry again but that
marriage also failed. Fanny Brice continued to perform and was best
know for her Baby Snooks character that she would act out on radio
until the 1950's. She died in 1951 of a brain hemorrhage. The 1968
movie “Funny Girl” starring Barbara Streisand is loosely based on
the life of Fanny Brice.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Marion Harris started out as a
Vaudeville singer in the Midwest in the early 1910's. By 1917 she was
recording music and performing on Broadway. She is by many
considered one of the first women to sing blues and jazz songs
written by African-American songwriters. She continued to perform on
stage throughout the 1920's and began acting and singing in films.
In the mid-thirties Marion Harris moved to England where she had
performed at London's Cafe de Paris but her home was destroyed in a
Nazi rocket attack and moved back to the states. She died tragically
from burns after falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette in April
of 1944.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Who
would have thought growing up in the 70's (and 80's) for that matter
that we would be seeing these Marvel heroes brought to the screen in
such an authentic and successful fashion? I never did. That's why I
love, love, love these Marvel movies. Back in the 70's Marvel use to
put
these 'collector' Value Stamps in the back pages of their books. You
were meant to cut them out of your comic and collect them in a book. I
never did that but you could not miss those stamps with every Marvel
hero is some icon pose. Now-a-days telling
someone to clip something out of their comic book would be blasphemous!
But back then, for .25¢ or .30¢ you'd get the good ol' newsprint comic
that, yes, you would occasionally mark up and cut them up.

Yesterday
I worked up the Captain America one. Then I thought it would be fun
to see just how many of these characters have been brought to the
screen in a bit way.